What is it with cotton anyway?
America's lavish handouts to its farmers harvest poverty throughout the developing world. And they are illegal as well. That's the conclusion of a World Trade Organization panel that heard Brazil's challenge to the cotton subsidies that belie this nation's commitment to free and fair trade.
Cotton is far from the only crop that American farmers are able to dump on the international market at low prices thanks to federal subsidies. But it is one of the most outrageous cases. Brazil was wise in choosing it as the first target in the developing world's challenge of the roughly $1 billion a day in subsidies that rich nations dole out to their farmers. If the preliminary ruling stands, as expected, it may mean the beginning of the end for European and American practices that provide their farmers an unfair advantage.
In addition to Brazil, an agricultural superpower, some of the world's poorest nations, including the West African republics of Mali, Benin and Burkina Faso, are vindicated by the W.T.O.'s decision. Cotton is West Africa's cash crop, the one economic activity in which the region has a competitive advantage. By underwriting much of the costs of America's 25,000 cotton farmers with checks that can total $3 billion a year, Washington erases that advantage. Aided by American experts who are critics of this warped system, Brazil convincingly argued that in the absence of subsidies, the United States would have produced and exported substantially less cotton than it did in recent years. Consequently, growers elsewhere would have enjoyed greater market share and higher prices.
The glaring contradiction between American farm subsidies and the principles underlying the global trade system has long posed a moral and political problem for Washington. Now it is also a legal problem. Instead of digging in its heels and spending years appealing the panel's ruling, the Bush administration needs to seize upon it as a reason to negotiate the surrender of rich nations' trade-distorting farm subsidies.
